Like its Glass wearable computer, Google's self-driving car has been a revelation, a visual bridge towards a smarter future where integrated and ubiquitous computing makes life better and safer.

But just as Google Glass has tapped into some of our deepest fears about technology run amok, so does the idea of the self-driving car make us instinctively think of how much could go wrong. The most recent episode of HBO's Silicon Valley, which showed the hijacking by an autonomous car of a hapless character who was transported to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is only the latest, most hilariously terrifying example.

The thing is, we're all aware that emerging technologies like self-driving cars have an inevitability to them, regardless of our anxiety. We will be sharing our roads with robot cars and trucks in the next few years. And in the days after that, the automated versions will likely crowd out driver-operated vehicles in all but a few designated areas to the point that human-controlled driving goes the way of the horse-drawn buggy.

If that future has you worried, you ought to have a chat with Freescale Semiconductor's Davide Santo. The head of the semiconductor firm's Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) microcontroller business, Santo combines pragmatism and a philosophical outlook in describing how the automotive industry is heading towards a self-driving future ... and how that future shouldn't make us too anxious.

Freescale on Tuesday will announce a multi-year collaboration with Neusoft and Green Hills Software to develop a future ADAS platform combining hardware and software that will usher in semi-autonomous vehicles as early as 2017 and pave the way for fully automated cars, trucks, and buses within the next decade.

The plan is to take sensors and microcontrollers developed by Freescale with its CogniVue APEX Image Cognition Processing hardware and layer in Neusoft's ADAS visual software with the Integrity operating system and Multi tool chain from Green Hills to create a solution for safe and reliable automated driving.

"As ADAS vision systems grow to encompass a greater portion of vehicle braking and steering systems, developers and systems designers need turnkey solutions that address stringent protocols for automotive safety, and are compliant with the ISO 26262 functional safety standard. This purpose-built ADAS ecosystem is engineered to meet these challenges by streamlining the time-consuming process of developing and porting complex algorithms to target hardware," Freescale said in a statement announcing the partnership.

All well and good—the standardization of a self-driving vehicle platform is the correct path for this technology to take as it grows beyond what's essentially a one-off prototype from Google and moves into volume manufacturing and distribution.

But as with wearable computers and other potentially world-changing technologies, all of this stuff can be pretty hard to swallow. We like having control of our cars. We don't like the idea of putting our lives in the hands of computers, even if rationally, we know that we already do quite regularly in today's world. Every time a computer malfunction causes a catastrophe, a thousand or more human-generated errors wreak even more havoc.

That's where a guy like Santo comes in. The Freescale executive is very much a technophile, but he's also very much an Italian. The urge to drive powerful cars with wild abandon runs through his veins.

"The psychological aspect of having an autonomous vehicle is very important," Santo said when we spoke late last week. "I drive aggressively, I'm Italian, I was raised that way and it's in my nature."

Won't the rise of the self-driving car—and with it, perhaps, even legislation that limits how much human beings can control their own vehicles—eliminate the joy of hitting the open road with a Ferrari or a Maserati?

Perhaps, but as we examine this line of thinking in our conversation, Santo brings up the example of the smartphone—another paradigm-changing technology that's emerged in recent years. Mobile devices can accurately be described as a tether, a crutch, a distraction from more intimate human interactions. But by putting powerful computing and connectivity in our hands wherever we go, they've also been enormously liberating for humankind.

Self-driving cars may restrict us in some ways but may also open up new possibilities for freedom that we can't yet imagine perfectly, because that's so often what happens with radical new technologies, he said.

"How do you enjoy the sense of freedom in an autonomous vehicle? One way, perhaps, is that like you have with an iPhone—you know, it can understand your accent, so maybe your car can understand your accent or your culture and understand your driving preferences," Santo said.

The Munich, Germany-based Freescale executive also sees the benefits of a well-designed autonomous vehicle outweighing any negatives.

"You can imagine a world where no machines can cause accidents in the future. Our primary goal is, how can we make driving safer and more comfortable? We will be changing the way the car is experienced," he said.

In building its future hardware platform for self-driving cars, Freescale will be designing sensors and microcontrollers based on both IBM's Power architecture and the ARM architecture. Santo said his company will depend on Power for its stability and history, while ARM represents the "capability of a larger ecosystem."

The upshot is that Freescale thinks that it can produce a viable, next-gen "plug-and-play" ADAS platform with Neusoft and Green Hills for car makers to test by the first half of 2015. If all goes as planned, Santo said that platform should start appearing in commercial vehicles by the end of 2017 or beginning of 2018, with retail-available cars and trucks to follow.

"This is the evolution of the market, which today offers in the ADAS space some assistive functions, for example warning systems, like lane-keeper systems and parking assistance," Santo said. "What we are doing is mapping out the future of the automated vehicle where we can delegate a larger part of the function of driving to the car itself.

"We could go from a semi-autonomous vehicle to a fully autonomous vehicle. We can imagine vehicles that will have no drivers at all."

About the Author

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Ch... See Full Bio

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